Excerpt formatting problems

On my site, I’m using the following code in my index:

<?php if ($posts) { foreach ($posts as $post) { start_wp(); ?>
<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="<?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_excerpt(); ?></a>
<?php }} ?>

This is just to bring up a list of all of the excerpts from every post.

What I’m having a hard time with is that when <?php the_excerpt(); ?> returns each excerpt, it surrounds each of them with <p> </p> , forcing each excerpt onto a separate line, and I don’t want it to do that. Anyone know how I can prevent this? Thanks very much for any help.